[c-nsp] Older gear and IPv6

[Charles Mills]

Hi all just to clarify ... yes I am thinking about cisco gear mostly.
With IPv6 exhaustion "around the corner" we certainly seem to be
devoid of options for gear that can route IPv6 reliably and robustly.

Reminds me of when switches were all the rage vs. shared hubs in the
CSMA/CD world...leaking spanning tree packets...buggy VLAN
implementations.  Should be an interesting few years as all this gets
worked out.

Chuck

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Gert Doering <gert at greenie.muc.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 10:36:54AM -0400, Charles Mills wrote:
>> What about older layer 2 gear?  Are there any issues there or is a
>> packet just a packet regardless of the address format?  I can't think
>> of anything to worry about here unless there are MTU issues.
>
> There's a small caveat: IPv6 uses much more multicast than IPv4 - so
> there *might* be problems with switches that treat multicast "specially"
> (we had problems with old Extreme Summit24i eating IPv4 EIGRP packets,
> because "multicast must be treated special!!").
>
> I'm not acutely aware of anything halfway recent that does this, though.
>
> Besides that - well, no management via IPv6, of course, but this is
> something we consider not crucial for the next few years.
>
>> Are any hardware vendors making IPv6 capable gear that does hardware
>> switching or are we processed switched for the time being?
>
> For Layer3, all the recent gear should treat it the same as v4 - that
> is, either both is hardware switched, or both is software ("Cisco 7200").
>
> gert
> --
> USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
>                                                           //www.muc.de/~gert/
> Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
> fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert at net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de
>